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Cruel Beauty

This book had been so worth my time. Like the author said, it had been a melodramatic fantasy read. It indeed was. Giving me the perfect blend of it.

The story begins from this one phrase,

I was raised to marry a monster

I guess anyone would be sucked in and I was. Eventually I just couldn’t let myself go in this book, it was just way too good.

Nyx as a character here is just a very conflicted character. She hates her family, her father and aunt who had basically betrayed her. Even her own sister sometimes. She had kept her feelings from her sister, as she did not deserve it. Well until she snaps. I guess that makes her a very relatable heroine, Badass no, anti hero quite so. Raised to believe she would die, she would invoke sympathy from most.

She is still cruel and quite malicious. It just adds to her character as it would make sense. She was cast aside, raised and groomed to kill and die. Rather than being raised to live. Unlike her sister who had been loved by others. She wasn’t. She was relatable in her own way, malicious to those that really metered out her fate.

Ignifex, can I just say that he in a sense was swoonworthy. He may have overtaken them. But he offered bargains to people who in the end really deserved what they got. As he said, the honest would never bargain. Only those that believed they deserved it will.

That was what I enjoyed about this story the most. Everything was themed to bargains and their prices. From Nyx’s fate in the beginning, which was a cause of a bargain. To Ignifex’s past, also a bargain.

The bargains here carry prices, it is shown through Ignifex and at the same time The Kindly Ones.

The Kindly Ones are intriguing. They dealt and made bargains, but those who accepted it in the end was humans and no one else. They were interesting, as they did not seem to take any shape. The story here in a sense was set up by them.

The atmosphere and background of the story had been very vague. But somehow I didn’t mind it, as the story made up for it. I wouldn’t mind an intriguing relationship from time to time. The melodrama here was actually interesting. Nyx was supposed to kill him yet she couldn’t as he wasn’t everything he appeared. He had made bargains, but who seeked him out? Her own father had been indeed the one to give her the fate. Thus, I didn’t pity those who agreed to the bargain, but those who had been affected by it.

The story at the end of the day, revealed a lot of mindset. Talked about morality even despite the retelling of beauty and the beast. But behind all that melodrama was an interesting story through and through.